All Other Nights (38 page)

“These shrouds are so unbecoming,” she announced.

Everyone looked up, flabbergasted. How had she gotten there? Jacob didn’t know either, but it didn’t matter. She was proceeding down the stairs now; soon she was standing on the landing again, next to her own coffin. She cast the shroud aside, revealing, yet again, an entirely different dress. It was a plain white gown that was strangely inappropriate—too poor for this sort of society ball, even under the circumstances. Despite his compromised vision, even Jacob could see where the skirt had been torn and patched. The audience, still amazed, burst once more into applause. But Jacob kept watching her, his one eye watering as he struggled not to weep. She was wearing her wedding gown.

“Thank you all so much for indulging me this evening,” she declared, with a sweeping curtsy. “I hope to see you all again soon, well above ground.”

Miss Cary had ascended to the landing, a wide grin on her face as she took Jeannie by the hand and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a round of applause for Miss Eugenia Van Damme!”

The cheering was loud and long, almost endless. Jacob watched as Jeannie wearied of it and began to retreat, gradually edging toward the curtained door at the back of the landing. And that was when a man near the front of the room, with officer’s epaulets, raised his one remaining arm and shouted over the crowd’s applause, “Miss Van Damme, will you marry me?”

Jacob assumed that this was simply an offhand joke, crude but unremarkable. But the other guests made no such assumptions. To Jacob’s astonishment, the guests stopped clapping and leaned forward with genuine curiosity, waiting to hear the celebrity’s reply. Every person in the room was drunk on dirty water and dreams.

In her wedding dress, Jeannie was perfectly poised. “Of course,” she replied.

The guests gazed at her, unsure of whether to believe her. Jacob sat motionless. Then Jeannie smiled, and everyone laughed. “But yours is a rather popular request, and I’m afraid it would be cruel to the other gentlemen in the room not to acknowledge their interests as well,” she said. “So I must try to be fair.” Jacob swallowed. Had she seen him? No, she was still grinning, still Miss Eugenia Van Damme. It was all a joke to her. Even her own wedding gown was nothing more than a disguise.

“Hold a lottery!” someone shouted.

“Why don’t we hold an auction?” Jeannie suggested, eyeing Miss Cary. “For the benefit of the hospital, of course. Miss Cary can be the auctioneer.”

Antonia nudged Jacob, gasping. “Can you imagine?” she huffed. “How utterly revolting. I’ve heard she’s had dozens of paramours.”

Had she? He thought of his affair with her cousin, and was surprised to discover that he did not care if she had. He only cared—and cared desperately—whether she had one now.

But now Miss Cary was holding a wooden spoon that someone in the audience had passed to her, her angular face grinning wildly. “An excellent idea, Miss Van Damme. Let’s begin!”

Jeannie jumped up onto the coffin, standing on it as if it were an auction block. Miss Cary banged the spoon against the end of the banister, and affected her best attempt at a baritone drawl. “Gentlemen, next on the block is Eugenia Van Damme, age twenty-one, in the prime of her breeding years. She has proven herself to be exceptionally industrious in the fields, and her former masters have lauded her for her unimpeachable servitude. I am, however, obliged to admit that she does have one demerit—her attempts at escape.”

Everyone laughed, but Jacob was sickened. He watched as Jeannie paced back and forth on the wooden coffin and thought of Dorrie, naked on the block, down the street from Philip’s old office. What had so nauseated him on that long-ago afternoon was, to everyone here, simply routine, ripe for parody only because it was so familiar. He glanced at the glasses of dirty water that were littered about the hall, and realized something. The secret service had been sending him gold coinage to defray his expenses, much of which he was obliged to keep on his person, out of fear of burglary in his inconspicuously poor lodgings. But even his commanders did not appreciate how starved the city was. He suddenly understood that he was the richest person in the room.

“Shall we start the bidding at twenty dollars for Eugenia Van Damme?” Miss Cary called. “In gold only, gentlemen.” Confederate cash was worthless, of course; even the otherwise deluded knew that. “Do I hear twenty dollars for Eugenia Van Damme?”

“Twenty-five,” a man in the back of the room yelled.

“Thirty,” countered another, near the front.

“Thirty-five.”

“Forty.”

Miss Cary held the spoon high. “Forty dollars. Do I hear fifty?”

Rose had warned him to stay back, to avoid being noticed.
She hates you
, he heard Rose say in his head. Surely it was true. But how could he simply watch?

“Fifty,” a man just past Antonia called.

“Sixty.”

“Sixty-five.”

“Seventy.”

If Jeannie saw him, she would turn him in. It wasn’t even a question. Perhaps she would even expose him onstage, in front of everyone. But what if he were to wait, and someone else were to take her? The auction was just a game, of course, but to Jacob it represented something larger: at any moment, she might fall in love with someone else, and forget him forever. Every man in Richmond was clearly drooling over her; it was surely only a matter of time before she attached herself to someone else, if she hadn’t already. But if he at least made the attempt, then there was some small possibility that he might stand beside her again, even if only for a moment. And even if he were caught and hanged tomorrow, she would at least know that he had never forgotten her—that he had made a promise to her father and kept it, that he had wanted to see the baby, that he knew the meaning of devotion, that he had tried.

“One hundred,” Captain Strathmore shouted, to cheers.

Jacob raised his hand. “One hundred fifty,” he called, with as much drawl as he could summon.

“Jacob!” Antonia gasped.

Her idle jealousy made him smile. The other hands in the room had gone down by now; only Captain Strathmore remained. “One hundred fifty-five,” he announced.

It was a transparent tactic, one Jacob recognized immediately as a businessman. He was finished. “Two hundred,” Jacob said. Dorrie had sold for more than six times that.

“Two hundred,” Miss Cary repeated. “Two hundred. Going once. Going twice.” The room was silent. Miss Cary banged the spoon on the banister. “Sold, for two hundred dollars gold, to the gentleman with the eye patch. Please, sir, come up to the block and claim your property.” The crowd cheered.

Jacob stood up, slowly, with the eyes of the guests on him. Jeannie squinted in his direction and quickly looked away, granting her beautiful smile to the crowd. She didn’t recognize him.

Miss Cary helped him up the steps to the landing. He stood in front of Jeannie, displayed on the platform in her wedding dress, and tried not to stare. She looked at him again, but only briefly. She still had barely glanced at his face. Instead, she watched as he pulled out his change purse, leaning on his cane as he dropped gold coins into Miss Cary’s open hands, to the applause of the guests. “What is your name, sir?” Miss Cary asked with a smile.

“Sergeant Samuels,” he replied, employing the accent to full effect. It was a name he was used to.

“Sergeant Samuels, we cannot thank you enough for your generous contribution to Chimborazo Hospital,” she said, to further applause. Then she glanced at Jeannie, who fell immediately into character. Jeannie swooped down in a deep curtsy, dropping almost to her knees before him on the coffin. He could barely breathe. “As there are no priests on the premises this evening to perform the sacrament,” Miss Cary continued, “I’m afraid you will have to consider this merely a betrothal, rather than a wedding ceremony. I trust that will be acceptable.”

“Quite acceptable,” he said in his artificial drawl. The guests tittered. But he couldn’t take his eye off Jeannie, groveling before him for the benefit of the crowd.

At last she rose, shimmering in her wedding gown. “Thank you for your purchase, Sergeant Samuels. I shall look forward to loving, honoring, and obeying you for the remainder of my days,” she said, winning laughs from the guests. But before he could even catch her eye, she turned to Miss Cary, silently urging her. Miss Cary nodded quickly, and turned back to the crowd.

“I’m afraid we must say goodnight to Miss Van Damme now and allow her to return home, so that she may continue to raise the morale of her adoring public in the future,” Miss Cary announced, and turned to Jacob. “Sir, if you would like to meet your betrothed outside, a servant shall escort you,” she said, and then eyed Jeannie. “If that is all right with Miss Van Damme.”

“Don’t worry, Miss Cary,” Jeannie grandly announced. “If he attempts anything ungentlemanly, I can outrun him.”

Jacob smiled. She always could. The crowd laughed as a slave took him by the elbow, helping him down the stairs and back into the audience, around the edges of the room, and toward the front door. But no one was looking at him now; once again, all eyes were on Jeannie.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in one more round of applause for Miss Eugenia Van Damme!” he heard Miss Cary announce behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Jeannie curtsying one more time, and then hastening down from the coffin and through the curtain behind the landing, as two slaves hurried up behind her to begin moving the coffin through the same curtain. The audience was still cheering when the slave deposited Jacob at the entrance to the Carys’ home. The door closed behind him. He stood leaning on his cane in the cold evening air, wondering if the person he was tonight was the person he would always be.

JACOB WOULD HAVE
expected a carriage to be waiting for Jeannie after her performance, but he was surprised to find nothing outside but the empty road, lit by the grand lamps beside the Carys’ front door. He had forgotten that Jeannie wasn’t actually part of high society here any more than he was. She was merely their entertainment, work for hire. A quarter of an hour later, when his legs were on the verge of collapse, he saw her rounding the corner of the house, emerging from a servants’ entrance. She wore a thin dark cloak over her white wedding dress, with a satchel slung over her shoulder, her hair pulled back, unadorned, behind her head. She saw him standing by the door and squinted, hesitating for an instant before continuing to approach. He saw her coming toward him in her wedding gown, walking with unassuming steps, her grandiosity dissolved, and he could not believe that he was not dreaming. His remaining eye filled with tears.

Now she stood before him, and looked down at her feet. She still did not look at him. “Sergeant Samuels, I am quite appreciative of your generosity toward the hospital,” she said. She spoke in her real voice this time, drained of all pretense. “But I trust you recognize that the tone of the evening was in jest. I would be pleased to become better acquainted with you at another time, I truly would. But I must hurry home now. I hope you will understand.”

“I do,” he said, in his own real voice. “But I would very much like to become better acquainted with you, Jeannie. With you, and with our baby.”

Now Jeannie looked up, and stared at him. She stared and stared, her beautiful dark eyes taking in his eye patch, his cane, his scarred face, his smile. The world opened up between them. Before he could say anything more, his wife fainted—this time for real.

“I
WILL KILL YOU, I WILL, IF YOU SO MUCH AS COME NEAR ME OR MY
baby, I will kill you, I will—oh God, Jacob, what happened to you?”

Jacob leaned over Jeannie as she opened her eyes, crouched painfully on his cane as she rose up from the ground. At first she backed away from him, frightened, shaking as she threatened him. When she stopped speaking, she stood watching him for a very long time, motionless in her wedding gown. She stepped toward him and squinted at him, absorbing his eye patch, his disfigured skin. He stood in silence as her eyes moved along the scars on his face.

“I thought you had died,” he finally said.

She remained motionless. He watched her, still amazed that it was really she, and tried to imagine what she was thinking. Did she hate him? Was he a beast to her now, inside and out? What reason could she ever have to forgive him?

At last she said, “Our daughter looks like you.”

The sound of horses’ hooves clopped toward them as a carriage rounded a corner in the distance, coming toward the house. “The guests will start leaving soon,” Jeannie said, under her breath. “Come this way.”

She began hurrying toward the back of the Cary sisters’ home, where he had seen her come out of the servants’ door. But he couldn’t walk as fast as she could, and it took her a moment to adjust to his pace. He saw where she was taking him—to a large wooden tool shed on the far side of the house.

She pulled open the door of the shed and stepped into it. Jacob followed. As she vanished into the shadows, he leaned against the wall inside the shed for balance, reached into his pocket and struck a match. When the match ignited, he looked around and saw that the shed was full of Jeannie’s props: the trick handcuffs, the slip-knotted ropes, the barrel nailed shut with too-short nails, and even her red dress, its skirts rumpled inside-out and its dozens of secret pockets revealed. Opposite the door, Jeannie’s coffin was standing upright, the trap door in its side hanging open on its hinges. In the flickering light of Jacob’s match, Jeannie stepped back toward him. He watched as she took a half-burned candle out of the satchel on her shoulder and touched it to the match’s flame between them, a tiny quiet kiss of heat and light. She dipped its other end into the flame and planted it on the lid of the trunk, before closing the door behind them.

The air in the little shed was still. Jacob shook out the match and waited, his gentleman’s reflex strangely intact, as Jeannie sat down on the cotton bale, her wedding gown spread across it as though she were seated on a cloud. He settled down beside her, startled when the cotton didn’t give beneath him but instead remained as firm as a wooden bench, as if there were some sort of support inside it. Of course there was. She was examining him now in the candlelight, wincing as her eyes scanned and then avoided his disfigured face. She looked away from him, and he saw the slight revulsion in her expression. He was hideous, and he always would be. He looked at the dripping candle, watching each teardrop of wax harden as it slid away from the little flame. At last he found the strength to speak.

“I didn’t turn you in, Jeannie. I turned in your sister, because I was afraid, but I never turned you in. I—I’m so sorry.”

She was silent. He looked back up at her and saw that she was stealing glances at his scars, blinking her eyes. At close range in the candlelight, it was clear how much she had aged in these few long years—how her eyes had grown tired, her forehead and cheeks creased by worry and fear. But her sadness only made her more beautiful, making her face more mysterious, more captivating. The curve of her body in her wedding gown still enchanted him. Everything about her enchanted him. He could hardly bear sitting beside her; it took all of his strength not to take her in his arms. But he could not tell whether she wanted to be taken. He held back, afraid, as she remained silent.

He rubbed at his remaining eye, blinded. A moment passed in darkness before his vision adjusted again, as he waited for her to speak. But she said nothing. “I waited for you that night,” he said, when he could wait no longer. “I would have waited for days, if I could have.”

Still she was silent. Her silence horrified him. He made one more attempt to speak, no longer able to keep the pleading out of his voice. “When I reached Washington, I tried to convince them to release you,” he said. It was weak, feeble, but it was all that he had. She hadn’t even needed him; she had released herself. “I asked them to exchange you for your father,” he added. “I—” But he didn’t know what else to say.

She was silent for another long moment, a small eternity. Finally she spoke. “Lottie said she saw our father at the border when she—when they—” She stopped, holding her breath, and at last looked back at him. “You arranged that?”

Jacob’s head was throbbing. He tried to ignore it. He was half-seeing and half-imagining the woman in front of him; the gleam of the light on her lips was so glorious that it could not possibly belong to the same world as this dirty tool shed full of broken chains. He pictured her standing with her sisters in the front room of Philip Levy’s house, the mirror behind her reflecting her ribbon in his hair. He still could not believe that it was really she. “I meant for them to release you, not your sister,” he said softly, too terrified to lie. “And I didn’t intend it to take two years.”

“You don’t know what a gift you gave us, just to know that he was freed,” she said. “No one told us that it was because of you.” The shed was cold, but the air between them was warm with her breath. “Have you seen him?” she asked.

Her father was the one who mattered to her, he understood. “A few months ago, in Philadelphia,” he answered. “He was living with his brother.”

Jeannie leaned toward him. He could smell her now, an unexpected smell that he had long forgotten—a sweet scent of ripe longing in the hollow of her neck, like fresh fruit. “Really?” she gasped. “Oh God, how—was he well?”

Jacob thought of everything he hadn’t told her and her sisters while Philip was in jail, the familiar lies welling up in his mind. He pushed them away. “He’s aged twenty years,” he said. “He had heard that you were dead. He asked me to come here, to try to find you and your sisters. It was all that mattered to him.”

Now she was watching him, her face skeptical. “You came here for him?”

Jacob perceived the doubt in her eyes, and started thinking quickly—the liar’s reflex, planning the best approach. But then he stopped planning, and told the truth. “No,” he said. “I came here for you.”

Her eyes returned to his scars, and she cringed, a visceral disgust. He turned away from her to spare her his ugliness. But as he turned away, he felt her hand curl around his, her fingers warm and alive against his cold hard palm. He held his breath. In two and a half years of dreams, he had forgotten the specific beauty of her hands, the firm enveloping power of her magician’s fingers around his mortal palm. He saw her looking down at his hand in hers, and he knew she was imagining how he used to be. The pity in her expression was unbearable. But he couldn’t release her hand.

“When I heard you were captured, I—I—” he stammered after a moment, when at last he was sure she wouldn’t let go.
I was devastated
, he would have said, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He was still too ashamed to ask her about anything that had happened since—too ashamed, even, to ask about the child. “I wanted to go to see you in the prison, but no one would allow it.”

Her hair had fallen loose from where she had tied it behind her head, a dark curl hanging over her eye. It reminded him of her cousin Abigail. He flinched, oppressed by every mistake he had ever made, every unforgiven sin. She brushed the loose curl behind her ear. To his surprise, she smiled. Her smile unnerved him, as though he were once again sitting beside her in the front room of the house after her sisters had gone upstairs, alone with her for the first time. “You wouldn’t have found me there in any case,” she said. “I was sent to the hospital within hours, and then I was gone.”

“I guessed as much, when I saw your show this evening,” he said, watching her as she enjoyed his bewilderment. Her hand was still wrapped around his. “But I don’t understand how you were able to convince the doctors in the hospital that you were dead.”

Now her smile was even wider, as though she were trying not to laugh. It was the way she had looked at him the first time they met, when she had helped herself to his wallet, before he understood who she was. He still wasn’t sure whether she was laughing at him. “The ward of the hospital in Washington didn’t have any other lady patients, so the nurses put up a curtain around my bed when I was carried in,” she began. He listened, mesmerized. “After my supposed collapse, I borrowed a pistol from the guard, which I kept under my dress. When the doctor came behind the curtain to examine me, he put his ear against my chest to listen to my heart. I pressed the pistol against his head and whispered to him, ‘Pardon me, Doctor, but I must inform you that a guerrilla force of Rebels has infiltrated this hospital. Four of your fellow doctors are our agents, as are twelve of the nurses and twenty-seven of the patients. All of us are armed. The only way you can survive this situation is if you succeed in releasing me alive. If you sign my death certificate, declare me dead, and send my body promptly to the morgue, you will spare yourself and your true patients from further retribution. If you fail to do this, or if you tell anyone about this exchange, I will kill you immediately, and the shot will signal the others to begin the revolt. Doctor, am I being perfectly clear?’” She added with a grin, “The next thing I saw was a sheet being drawn over my face, and I heard the doctor telling the guards from the prison that the Lord would surely have mercy upon my sinful soul.”

Jacob laughed out loud, and Jeannie laughed with him. For a moment it was as if nothing had been lost, as if they were laughing together in the front room of her father’s house, as if she had forgotten how he had disfigured himself in every possible way. But he remembered.

“How did you get out of Washington?” he asked.

Her smile faded. She shook her head, drawing her feet up onto the cotton bale and pulling her knees against her chest, huddled in her wedding dress against the wall of the shed like a child. Her hand slipped from his. “I won’t tell you,” she said. “What I did was unforgivable. Even you wouldn’t have done anything like it.”

He considered her, diminished in the shadows against the wall of the shed, and remembered his own smallness, how he was nothing more than dust and ashes. “I’m quite certain that I would have,” he said, and at last decided to confess. “Before I met you, I murdered my own uncle.”

She stared at him, incredulous, then suddenly smiled. “Jacob, you’re an awful liar,” she said.

He forced himself to look at her. “No, Jeannie, it’s true. That was my first mission. My uncle was plotting to kill Lincoln, so I was assigned to kill my uncle first.” He thought of adding the gruesome details—how it had happened at the Passover seder, how Harry Hyams had poured out his wrath onto the table before him, how Elizabeth had doubled over screaming, how easily he had become the angel of death. But he was not that brave. Instead he added, “He really would have killed Lincoln, Jeannie. I heard him planning it. It was beyond doubt. I saved Lincoln’s life.” As he said it, he could hear how false it sounded, how little he believed it even now, how certain he still was that Harry Hyams would never have gone through with it.

He watched as her smile disappeared, her mouth slowly falling open. “Jacob,” she breathed. “How could you have agreed to do that?”

“How could I have said no?”

Her beautiful face was pale. “He was your uncle,” she said, her voice still. “You could have said no.”

He tried to think of a reply, but there was none. Suddenly he understood that she was right. He could have said no. And he hung his head in shame.

She shifted in her place, lowering her legs back to the floor as a loose chain clanked somewhere against a wall. The coffin cast a flickering shadow over her face. Jacob looked at the seam sewn across the lap of her wedding gown, wishing there were some way he could atone. He thought of what Benjamin had warned: that the person he was that night was the person he would always be. But didn’t that make repentance impossible?

“After I escaped from the hospital, there was a Federal army captain whom I—whom I—befriended,” Jeannie finally said.

He was grateful to hear her voice, until he realized what she meant. Now he looked up at her, but she was looking away, her fingers tracing patterns on the patched skirt of her dress. “And he helped you to come home?” he asked, with forced innocence.

“He did,” she said, then stopped, still looking at the seam on her skirt. “I was frightened, and desperate, and already expecting.” He watched her, refusing to understand, until he did. She brushed a curl behind her reddened ear, and added, “I could have said no.”

He looked at the candle, afraid that she would think he was judging her. He was, of course, just as she was judging him. She lowered her head, blinking her eyes in the dim room. He waited a long time, sitting beside her, until he sensed the shame slowly dissipating, the residue of all their deeds staining the ground beneath their feet.

“Jeannie, what is our daughter like?” he asked.

She looked up at him, and he saw how her face illuminated, suddenly brightened by something close to happiness. “Her name is Deborah, and she is always smiling,” she answered. “Most children her age are afraid of strangers, but she runs up to people in the streets to say hello. She smiles at everyone, even the crippled beggars and the slaves. We joke that she could be a society hostess, except that her tastes are a bit too democratic.” It was impossible to imagine this, though he struggled mightily to try. “I named her after my mother,” Jeannie said, “but she looks exactly like you. It’s almost frightening. Every time I look at her, I think of you, whether I want to or not,” She looked down at her knees. “For most of the past two years I haven’t particularly wanted to think of you,” she said. “To say that I hated you would be too generous. I wanted you to suffer.”